Now When It Rains

Description

Tihei mauri ora! The breath of life!
I started breathing deeply, breathing out the poems I’d begun to write after I gave up being somebody I wasn’t. All those roads, all those masks, all those stumbles.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman examines a life lived over 70 years through rapid social changes and personal upheavals, from the 1950s to the 2000s, as he stumbles towards becoming the writer he believed he could be. Growing up on the West Coast in the shadow of his father’s war and later imprisonment, he drops out of university and learns too much about drugs & alcohol while working as a shearer, bin-man and fisherman. Later in life he learns te reo and publishes groundbreaking history and memoir. This is a vital chronicle of our times; a frank and compelling insight into the writer’s mind — and soul.

About the author

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, memoir and history. The title poem from his 2003 Montana Book Award shortlisted collection, As Big as a Father, was the 1997 Whitireia Poetry Prize winner. He was a Copyright Licensing Award recipient in 2007 for Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Ernest-Scott History Prize (Australia). In 2012 he was awarded the Creative NZ University of Iowa Residency. His most recent works are The Lost Pilot: a memoir, Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems 1963–2016; and Dylan Junkie.